Sadly no foodstuffs are involved, but there is a prominently placed dissected cone, with ready-cut conic sections, in the left foreground. Alongside are some of the other essentials of the mathematical teacher: drawing instruments (today's 'geometry set' known to all kids heading back to school in the autumn), diagram, textbook and writing materials. It is less pencil and squared paper, of course, and more quill and ink.

The portrait is of Thomas Weston, who from 1712 headed Weston's Academy in Greenwich, which, in taking some pupils who were sons of pensioners at Greenwich Hospital, was one of the forerunners of Greenwich Hospital School. The portrait was the frontispiece to his book, "A copy-book written for the use of the young-gentlemen at the Academy in Greenwich" (1726).

The text in the picture is a lecture, clearly titled Lectiones Astronomicae Lectio 12. Astronomy and mathematics were Weston's specialty, especially as the basis to learning navigation. Before setting up his school, Weston had been an assistant to the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. At that time, he lived and worked at the Royal Observatory, an institution founded to help improve astronomical methods for finding longitude at sea.

There is another portrait of Weston, on the ceiling of the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital. Here he looks with admiration at Flamsteed, both in front of the mural arc that was, by the 1690s, the most significant instrument at the Observatory. Placed on a wall aligned north-south, it defined a Greenwich Meridian.

Source: National Maritime Museum

While I love the mathematical details in the foreground of this image, perhaps the most splendid thing about it is Weston, wearing a formal wig and, best of all, a striped dressing gown or banyan.

However, if the combination of food and science is more your thing, have a read of this post by Melanie Keene on the objects used to teach elementary astronomy. There are blueberries and oranges that might stand in for the relative sizes of planets but, even better, in the early 19th-century children's book, Tom Telescope:

the movement of the earth around the sun was best explained as like that of a rotisserie chicken. This "common occurrence in a kitchen" showed how it was "far better for the bird [the earth] to turn round before the fire [the sun], than the fire to turn round the bird".

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